An inspirational resource focused on design, typography, minimalism and modernism.

Posts Tagged with “vintage”

This Gringo hel­met by Biltwell makes me wish I still had a motor­cy­cle. The min­i­mal design doesn’t over­due it in any­way. It’s just a pure hel­met design with­out all the fancy vents and shapes. It’s a clas­sic design that will never get old, and you can get an awe­some bub­ble shield for it. Reminds me of the awe­some James Cann film, Roller­ball.

I’m not into The Strokes, but I am into the cover design of their lat­est album, Come­down Machine. It was designed by Brett Kil­roe and Tina Ibañez of Run­ner Col­lec­tive, and the min­i­mal, dis­tressed design is a trib­ute to an old RCA pack­age design for their record­ing tape. Looks like it was a fun project to work on.

Sorry for the silence. Sandy took out my power, so haven’t had much inter­net access. I hope every­one in the NYC area made it through the storm ok.

Now for some design good­ness. To Have And To Hold is an awe­some Tum­blr that fea­tures a col­lec­tion of paper bags from the 70’s and 80’s. The col­lec­tion is part of the Pre­ston Poly­tech­nic ephemera archive and is housed in their Library. Pretty cool.

Keep­ing with this weeks theme of clas­sic design, here’s a great site called Art of the Arcade by Nick Dart that show­cases the lost video game designs and illus­tra­tions from the 70s and 80s. Hope­fully it gets updated more frequently.

ABC Ver­lag (Edi­tion) was a book pub­lisher based in Zurich, Switzer­land that released a superb col­lec­tion of graphic design and fine art books between 1962 – 1989. I’ve been per­son­ally obsessed with these books and have been on a hunt for them for the last 4 years. They con­tain some of the best graphic design of the last cen­tury, and each book cov­ers a dif­fer­ent topic.

I recently uploaded pho­tos to my Flickr of my three most recent addi­tions to my collection:

I agree with Shelby, I’d pay good money to get my hands on these Ducats milk car­tons designed by Heinz Grun­wald in the 80s. They’re beau­ti­ful and func­tional. These are also a reminder of how bad design can get nowa­days. It’s our respon­si­bil­ity as design­ers to push graphic design back to this type of think­ing. Sim­ple, smart, beautiful.

Here’s some more vin­tage good­ness. I found this excel­lent Flickr set of vin­tage beer cans. I’ve never seen that odd can shape, looks like motor oil. Love it. There are also a few brand-less cans with only “Light Beer” printed on them which are really nice.

I’m really dig­ging these vin­tage oil can designs by Antrepo to show­case their type­face, Pub­lic Gothic. It makes you won­der what the hell hap­pened to our soci­ety that made us go from nice pack­ag­ing design like this, to this.

I’ve been a fan of Tim Navis’ work for some­time now, and I’ve been mean­ing to fea­ture it here. A recent post on ISO50 inspired me to finally do it.

Tim’s photo work is excep­tional. What stands out the most for me are the com­po­si­tions and color tones of the images. The col­ors have a nat­ural, almost vin­tage feel to them. Tim cre­ates vibrate and excit­ing col­ors, but there’s also a washed out look to them that I love. The blacks are never crushed, and the whites have a slight yel­low tint to them. I aim for sim­i­lar color tones in my pho­tos.

You can pur­chase some of these won­der­ful images over in Tim’s store.

I found this inspir­ing set of vin­tage cal­en­dars over at Grain Edit. For an aes­thetic stand­point, my per­sonal favorite is this 1970 Boffi Arreda­mento Cal­en­dar designed by A. Nava & G. Con­falonieri. I love the vis­i­ble grid and the geo­met­ric graphic. It’s hard to tell how func­tional it was.